The Sunday Read: ‘The Bodily Indignities of the Space Life’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

As an incubator of life, Earth has a lot going for it, something we often fail to appreciate fully from within its nurturing bounds. Merely sending probes and rovers to the moon and Mars won’t do. For various reasons — adventure! apocalypse! commerce! — we insist upon taking our corporeal selves off-world too. Multiple private companies have announced plans to put hotels in space soon. NASA is aiming to 3-D-print lunar neighborhoods within a couple of decades. And while it will probably take longer than that to build and populate an outpost on Mars, preparations are being made: This summer, four NASA crew members began a 378-day stay in simulated Martian housing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Here’s some of what we know about how Earthlings fare beyond the safety of our home world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi. Hi, this is the Sunday Reed. My name is Kim Tingley and I'm a contributing
0:19.4	writer to the New York Times magazine. This week's episode is a story of mine from the magazine's recent issue devoted to outer space.
0:28.0	And my story is about what happens to us, to the human body, once we leave planet Earth.
0:36.4	Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin went up to space in 1961,
0:42.1	although we'd sent up animals before, at that time, we were still really
0:46.4	unsure what would happen to people in low gravity. Unsure about even the
0:51.8	basics.
0:52.7	Would you be able to swallow?
0:55.0	Would you choke on your own tongue?
0:57.8	As it turned out, during his 108 minute orbit around Earth, Yuri Gagarin could eat and drink just fine.
1:07.2	We learned from his short journey that we could go up there and back, and that some of our basic
1:12.0	functions would be okay.
1:15.0	And so, we sent more people up,
1:18.0	farther away and for longer periods of time,
1:21.0	first to the moon, and later to the International Space Station.
1:27.0	Fewer than 700 people have been to space.
1:30.0	It may sound like a lot, but it's not enough to draw conclusions about what long-term space
1:36.2	habitation would do to people.
1:39.7	Astronauts have tended to be a pretty homogenous group. They're physically fit, they're ultra-healthy
1:44.8	individuals, and so they're definitely not a representative sample of the human race.
1:52.0	What we do know is our bodies can adapt pretty quickly to space. At first, you might
1:58.1	get a kind of space car sickness, something called Space Adaptation Syndrome, which will eventually go away.
	...

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